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Streaming Video Binges Take Up Over 70% of the Internet

TV isn’t dead, after all. Instead, it’s just moved to a new location. Our laps:

by Kate Cox

Do you remember 2007? Way back then in the long-long ago times, movies came on physical discs and you binge-watched a TV series by happening to turn on the TV while a Law and Order marathon was running. Now, however, it seems like basically everything streams to us over the internet… and basically the whole internet, or at least a huge fraction of it, is for streaming.

That’s according to the latest report from Sandvine, a network analytics company that tells us, a few times a year, what exactly we are collectively using the internet for. Back in May, the company calculated that streaming video accounted for more than half of all the prime-time internet traffic in North America. Six months later, it seems our insatiable appetite for just one more episode only keeps growing.

70.40% of all downstream internet traffic (data coming from the internet to you, instead of going from you up to the internet) now falls into the category of “real-time entertainment,” according to Sandvine (PDF). That encompasses both video, like Netflix and YouTube, and also audio, like Spotify and Pandora. That’s approximately ten times the volume of the second-place catetgory, web browsing, which manages to take up barely over 7% of our collective bandwidth.

As for the video providers, big red remains the elephant in the room. Netflix alone accounts for more than a third of our internet use, clocking in at about 37% of downstream traffic. Second-place YouTube accounts for a smudge less than 18%, and third-place video provider Amazon clocks in at just over 2%. Running down the list of media providers from there, iTunes is 2.8% of our traffic, and Hulu about 2.6%. “Other” video takes up the rest….